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Gaming, In My Opinion
Wednesday 7th June, 2006, 16:23 GMT
Nintendo continue with their efforts to differentiate Wii from Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen giants. In a recent interview with Japanese news service Tec On!, the company’s president Satoru Iwata insisted that Nintendo are “not working on a next-generation console” in Wii.
He defined the phrase ‘next-generation’ as the implication that “the console is an extension of previous instalments”, which is what Iwata considers Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s Xbox360 to be. Wii, he claims, is a completely new machine.
Once again, he elaborated on Nintendo’s goal with Wii, explaining that the company decided to create an entirely new way of gaming because it was the only way of expanding the games market. He believes that following the examples of their competitors by merely extending their current technology with a true successor to Gamecube “could possibly even lead to smaller markets”. Could this last point be an admission that Nintendo might not survive the next generation if it follows the flock with a less unorthodox next-gen console?
The interview moved on to the subject of Wii’s online service, currently named WiiConnect24, as Iwata described the potential for providing gamers with demos of upcoming titles. Wii will continually be online, presumably in a similar manner to broadband, which “would allow Nintendo to send monthly promotional demos for the DS during the night to the Wii consoles in each household. Users would wake up each morning, find the LED lamp on their Wii flashing and know that Nintendo has sent them something.”
Such a system sounds highly promising. Not only would it create the first in-house ‘try-before-you-buy’ system from a software developer, it would also make Wii owners feel much closer to Nintendo than PS3 or 360 owners would feel to their respective providers of pixelated delights. This familiarity is another element Nintendo are hoping to present with the Wii (as they explained when revealing their familiar remote control-shaped controller), but it’s still not clear whether they will accomplish what they are aiming for.
Roll on November